


Thoughts in time and out of season

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [51]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:00:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29317509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: It was a mistake.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [51]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713
Kudos: 1





	Thoughts in time and out of season

"I don't want to shoot you," Frank had said, "and I don't want to talk to you, so just leave me alone, will you?" And he had walked out of the laundromat, leaving his laundry behind. There **had** been laundry, Roger had seen him put it in the dryer, though the way Frank had been behaving, it wouldn't've surprised Roger to find Frank just sitting in a laundromat, watching some stranger's clothes go around and around.

He hadn't had any real trouble finding Frank. With some guys you started with the bars and the strip clubs; with Frank McPike you started with the grocery stores and the laundromats.

Vince was dead? Frank had said so, but Frank wouldn't hesitate to lie to him where Vince was concerned, and probably not where Vince wasn't concerned. There was no love lost between them. But—Vince was dead? That couldn't be right. Aiuppo had rescued him, he'd settled down with Steelgrave, and was living a life of domestic bliss in a private bubble of denial in San Francisco. Of course that didn't grant him immortality, but what had he been doing back on the East Coast for his body to wash up on the Jersey Shore in the first place? Obviously he hadn't been the victim of a hit and run, or a burst appendix.

So, Steelgrave? From what Roger had seen, Steelgrave was as likely to become Attorney General as he was to kill Vince, but who else knew Vince was alive? Steelgrave's niece didn't seem to have any motive, unless she was pathologically opposed to her uncle's lifestyle, or even just his choice of partners—but even assuming that was the case, how would she have gotten Vince to that time zone, and how would she have done it without her uncle interfering?

Aiuppo? Roger really thought about that. He **had** reported back to the old man, after his conversation with Vince, had told Aiuppo that Vince was fine. Depressed, maybe, but fine, and while it was a shame the old man didn't approve of his stepson's choice of _inamorata,_ Steelgrave was still Vince's choice, and Steelgrave appeared to be devoted to him.

"I'm not as narrow-minded as you seem to think," Aiuppo had replied stiffly, but in the next breath he'd admitted that he didn't approve of Vince's being with Steelgrave. Still, he'd finished up with, "But as long as he's happy, I won't interfere."

_Maybe you should've interfered._

It was possible this was connected to Isle Pavot, though it didn't seem likely. Janet Getzloff had retired the year before to devote her energies to a battle with some kind of well-deserved cancer, and Roger couldn't see Vince being on her list of priorities. There were others, of course—there had always been others, others whose identities neither Roger nor Vince had ever known, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that one of them—

But what was the point to thinking about that? There was no way for Roger to find out. He wouldn't even know where to start asking.

But he still knew how to find Steelgrave.

Roger still had the credit card number Russell had gotten for him. The activity on it was pretty damning: two tickets to JFK, one of them round-trip, the other one-way, followed by a ticket to Italy. Steelgrave had taken Vince to New York, offed him, then flown home and then turned around and gone to Italy? It was kind of round-about—why not fly from New York to Italy?—but what did Roger know. Maybe Steelgrave had a lousy travel agent. Maybe he'd had to fly back home because he'd left the oven on. Roger knew it wasn't Steelgrave who'd used the one-way ticket, because he'd turned right around and flown back to New York, and then to Rome. Vince had gone nowhere once he'd got to the East Coast.

After his trip to the land of his people, Steelgrave had apparently come home. His credit card showed a flurry of charges in Rome, Palermo, Milan and Venice, then the usual San Francisco spending pattern resumed.

Steelgrave was back home, probably back in the same apartment since he was frequenting the same restaurants, using the same dry cleaner, shopping at the same grocery.

 _What the hell happened?_ Roger kept asking himself that question the whole flight from New Jersey to San Francisco. _I told Aiuppo everything was all right. I told him to leave Vince alone._

Things had seemed fine. The most Roger had seen was what could be described as Steelgrave being annoyed with Vince, which— _Steelgrave was **annoyed** with Vince? If being annoyed with Vince meant you had to kill him, McPike would've done it while he was still at Quantico, assuming he'd made it that far._

 _Could it have been the money? Did Vince tell him about it— Did Vince tell him about **them**?_ Not that there was really a **them** to tell about. Friends-with-benefits was a pretty good description of that part of their relationship.

But Roger had got the distinct feeling Vinnie didn't want Steelgrave to know any more about him than he had to. Had he slipped up somehow, had Steelgrave found out some other way and—

_Pathological jealousy? But luring someone across a continent to kill them could hardly be called a crime of passion._

Roger didn't care what Steelgrave's motive might have been. The point was, Roger had vouchsafed Vince's safety and Steelgrave had killed him—and then he'd just gone on with his life.

When the plane landed, Roger rented a car and drove to the apartment he'd been to before, and waited. For a week he waited, switching cars every two days so Steelgrave wouldn't get suspicious. He watched Steelgrave leave the apartment in the morning and watched him come home in the afternoon. His car came and went; Vince's stayed in its designated spot. Roger knocked on the door once, when Steelgrave wasn't home, and he called a couple of times, but there was no answer.

He checked his answering machine every day, not for a message from Vince, but out of habit; he'd been doing it every day, rain or shine, for so long now, it was like brushing his teeth. He tried not calling it one evening, but he felt itchy all night, as though he'd forgotten something important, and first thing the next morning he'd broken down and made his call. At some point he was going to have to make himself stop, but not yet. Not just yet.

There was something hideously wrong with this whole thing. That Vince should be rescued from what the world thought of as his death only to come home and be murdered by some two-bit Bugsy Siegel wannabe—it was an ignominious death, it made no sense, and Vince deserved better. And if Roger couldn't do anything about it—and as far as he knew, he **couldn't** do anything about Vince being dead—he could at least put an end to Steelgrave going happily off to wherever he went in the morning, to him having his Monday dinner in the same damned restaurant he'd dragged Vince to every week. Roger didn't need too much justice, and that was good because there seemed to be a limited supply of it in the world. But Vinnie had believed in justice—he'd believed in it passionately, and Roger was going to get him some.

It had been a long time since Roger had killed anyone. Maybe he would have done better to use something other than a ball bearing. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered what he'd used since at the last minute, Steelgrave had bent over to get something out of the glove compartment, and there was no reason to think he'd have done any differently if Roger had been aiming a gun at him. And if Roger had shot at him, Steelgrave would have realized that he'd been shot at. His reaction the to the ball bearing—from what Roger could see—was that of a man who'd had his car vandalized while he was in it. If Roger had used a gun, it was likely he'd never get a second chance.

Dinner at a Korean place he'd found, not bad, and he called his machine, expecting nothing, only to find two very angry messages from Vince.

He listened to the messages several times. (How many not dead friends can one person have? How many times can one dead friend not be dead? These were questions most people never asked, but in Roger's circle they beat out the one about the sound of one hand clapping.)

How had Frank got this wrong? He'd seemed flaky when Roger saw him, but not so flaky he didn't know the difference between _dead_ and _alive._ But Vince was most definitely alive—alive, and mad as hell. He'd left a message for Roger to meet him at a bar, and he didn't mean at Roger's earliest convenience.

Vince wasn't at the bar, but Roger had seen a car repair place that specialized in glass replacement down the block from it. And who better to replace the broken window of Steelgrave's car than his former driver? 

Vince was alive, all right. Vince was alive and barely speaking to him. Roger didn't care about the second part, not very much anyway. He felt as though he was grinning like an idiot as he walked over and asked him, "Have you by any chance been dead lately?"


End file.
